1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle braking device and a vehicle braking method, and particularly to brake control using information from a vehicle-installed preview sensor in combination with information from a road-side infrastructure.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been hitherto known a vehicle braking device for automatically braking a vehicle with no driver's braking operation as disclosed in the Japanese Published Patent Application No. 10-338111, for example. Such a type of vehicle braking device automatically judges the degree of risk at which the vehicle collides with a target object (a preceding vehicle, a pedestrian or the like) existing in front of the vehicle, and carries out a vehicle braking operation to avoid the collision when the degree of risk is high. In order to accurately carry out the vehicle braking operation matched with a forward condition of the vehicle, the vehicle requires precise detection of the target object located in front of the vehicle concerned. Therefore, it has been hitherto carried out to install a preview sensor (for example, a sensor using millimetric-wave or laser wave, or a stereo image processing device comprising a stereo camera and an image processing system) in a vehicle and scanning or imaging a scene in front of the vehicle by using the preview sensor to thereby detect/recognize the target object.
In the brake control based on only the information from the preview sensor, however, if a target object is misidentified by the preview sensor, brake control not matched with a condition may be carried out.